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The Personal Injury Search Market

Blueclaw

This week we’re focusing our blogs around professional services, and we start by taking a look at the personal injury search market, focusing on the search presence of personal injury lawyers.

Just a few years ago personal injury lawyer adverts seemed to dominate broadcast media. Nearly every single commercial break had an ad from a personal injury firm where someone had been “given the wrong type of ladder” to install a fire alarm, or where DS Don Beech from The Bill told you that you kept “100% of the compensation”.

But now, these adverts have become very rare. Is that an indication that there is less of a need or want for personal injury companies? Or have these types of company simply decided they’re well known enough to stop advertising?

Well, looking at the search trends, we can see that searches around ‘personal injury lawyers’ has declined over the past few years.

This decline in search interest could have happened for a number of reasons. For example, it could be a result of the lack of recent TV and radio ad campaigns, or it could be a decline in overall interest in people claiming for accidents – however without access to this kind of data this is pure speculation.

Using our MarketScout tool, we’ve run an analysis of the current search market for personal injury lawyers, using Claims.co.uk as our referring domain.

Unsurprisingly, as two of the UK’s biggest law firms, Slater and Gordon and Irwin Mitchell lead the way in terms of search visibility. The former has multiple rankings for the top 100 keywords in the personal injury sector, hence the reason why it shows 109 rankings in the top 10.

Meanwhile, our referring domain shows up 9th in the visibility table, and is competing well with those around them which include InjuryLawyers4U and National Accident Helpline.

Next we take a look at the Off-Site Equity of Claims.co.uk.

From an off-site perspective, Claims.co.uk is performing solidly, however it could do more to help boost its rankings. What’s noticeable here is that IrwinMitchell.com, InjuryLawyers4U.co.uk and National-Accident-Helpline.co.uk all have lower Trust Flows than our referring domain, yet all of these sites out rank Claims.co.uk from a keyword perspective. The number of referring domains Claims.co.uk has is also significantly lower than its rivals, which combined with a Trust Flow greater than its aforementioned rivals, suggests that the domains pointing to it are generally authoritative. However, in order to increase their rankings for other relevant keywords, Claims.co.uk should look to increase the number of relevant and authoritative domains pointing towards it.

From a Topical Equity point of view, it’s clear which topic your content should be about, and what kind of domains should be pointing towards your site in this sector.

It would be surprising if Society/Law wasn’t the topic most relevant to this sector! What is surprising though, is that Claims.co.uk don’t have this topic as part of their topical equity, whereas the majority of their competitors do. In order to strengthen this area, they should consider building some content and target earning links from authoritative domains with society/law as their main topic, such as industry publications.

Finally, these are the keywords from which the report was created. These are the top 100 keywords for this sector, taken from Google Keyword Planner.

The keywords are red, orange or green, depending on how easy it is for the site to rank for that term in its current state. Keywords with a tick next to them represent terms which the site is already ranking for.